


After All I've Said (Please Don't Forget)

by ficlicious



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergence - Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, F/M, Female Tony Stark, Other, Rule 63, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2018-12-22 18:03:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11972733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: He knows what’s coming. He can feel it like a black hole in the bottom of his stomach, a creeping, crawling dread that freezes his breath in his lungs, steals his ability to move. There’s an ache in his arm, the one he lost decades ago, a phantom burning right where his words used to be.Panic chokes his throat, and the metal of his fingers creaks as he clenches a fist so tight it sends jolts of distress surging through the neural connections into his brain.No. No, not now. Oh fuck, not her. Not here. Not like this.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Medie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Medie/gifts).



> Title from "Heathens" lyrics, by twentyone pilots
> 
> Because Medie.

He knows what’s coming. He can feel it like a black hole in the bottom of his stomach, a creeping, crawling dread that freezes his breath in his lungs, steals his ability to move. There’s an ache in his arm, the one he lost decades ago, a phantom burning right where his words used to be. 

Panic chokes his throat, and the metal of his fingers creaks as he clenches a fist so tight it sends jolts of distress surging through the neural connections into his brain.  _ No. No, not now. Oh fuck, not her. Not here. Not like this.  _

Toni’s eyes are bright and furious, beyond hurt, beyond betrayed. “I don’t care,” she says through a gritted-teeth smile of grief and wrath, and every word stabs him right through his heart with searing pain, because her gaze has shifted from Steve to him, and her lips are forming the syllables that he knows in his soul are going to cinch his damnation. “You killed my mom.”

Things blur after that. Bucky can’t hear past the hammering horror in his ears, the frantic beat of his pulse under his jaw. He’s fighting, he’s scrambling up the silo, he’s falling past a blur of red and gold and red and blue. It’s all happening too fast to process. His heart is racing, his breathing is near hyperventilation, and he can’t track if he’s coming or going, can’t figure out what he’s supposed to be doing. 

And then Toni has her arms around his throat, her armor hard and unyielding against his back, digging into his spine. “Do you remember them?” she hisses venomously, breath hot across his ear, and it crashes into him like a shot of pure adrenaline, shocking him out of his daze, screaming with his own anger and fear and grief and pain. 

“I remember all of them,” he rasps, gets his foot up on the wall and shoves with all his might. Her back hits the opposite wall in an unholy clatter of titanium and concrete, and her arms drop away from him. He wheels, hands coming up defensively, ready to fight or flee, he isn’t sure. He’s halfway through shifting into a flanking position, moving out of the way for Steve to do whatever Steve is going to do, and the look on her face stops him dead for the second time in a row. 

All the blood has drained from her face, and shock replaces the betrayal and rage in her round, wide eyes. She stares at him like she’s never seen him before, and her right gauntlet has a death grip around her left forearm, so tight he can hear the high pitched protest of the metal plates. “Oh  _ fuck _ ,” she whispers, and the sound is so hollow, so despairing, it breaks his fucking heart all over again. 

Steve’s already in motion. Bucky can see him in the corner of his eye, shield glinting as he winds up and throws it. Bucky knows Steve isn't trying to kill Toni, but the part of his brain that never stops calculating kill shots whispers in cold, frost-rimmed tones, telling him that Toni’s distracted, she’s open and vulnerable, she’s going to die if she doesn’t defend herself. 

He doesn’t stop to think, just throws himself into the path of the shield and throws his cybernetic arm up to intercept it. 

It hits him at an odd angle, bites into the hair-thin gap between two plates in his forearm, and he cries out at the flare of pain as circuits fry and fuse, snap and break, and his vision goes white and staticky. 

When he comes to, he's curled around his arm on the floor, Steve's hand on his shoulder, under his shoulder, helping him sit up. He groans, grits his teeth and swallows down any number of a curse words. His head is pounding, and it feels like an entire brace of daggers is embedded in his damaged arm. But none of that matters, because his words have just been spoken. With a sinking feeling in his stomach that doesn't  _ quite _ drown out the spark of hope, tiny and sputtering gamely in his chest, he looks around for Toni.

Toni's gone. 

That realization hurts more than the damage to his arm. 

Bucky isn’t sure what tips him off. Maybe it’s how blatantly Steve is avoiding direct eye contact. Maybe it’s all the little physical tics Bucky knows mean Steve desperately wants to not talk about something. Suddenly, he’s irritated, a surge of anger and frustration rising through his sinuses and spreading behind his eyes. “Did you know?”

Steve doesn’t look at him, just twisting his fingers around themselves in his lap. “I didn’t know it was her,” he says. 

And with that, he knows  _ exactly  _ how Toni must have felt in those last moments before Steve’s betrayal came crashing down on her. It seems only fitting to hit Steve with the same words she used. “Don’t bullshit me, Rogers. Did you know?”

It’s eerie, this deja vu, watching Steve swallow hard, watching his expression settle out into that resigned, backed-into-a-corner, nut-up-Rogers look. He clears his throat, squares his shoulders, sighs deeply and meets Bucky’s gaze unflinchingly. “Yes,” he replies.

He knows it’s coming, but the confirmation of it hits him like a punch in the gut, whuffs the air out of his lungs. He wonders what Steve’s seeing on his face, what expressions he’s shifting through, because Steve’s face is closed off, as immobile as stone, and his eyes are steady, unblinking. 

Unapologetic. 

_ Longing,  _ the Asset whispers with a Sokovian accent, and cold, dark oblivion beckons from the depths of his memory.  _ Rusted. Seventeen.  _

Steve blinks, and his face abruptly blanches. “Buck?”

It hurts, physically hurts, to wrench himself away from the precipice, to keep himself from sliding right back into the thoughtless, emotionless killing machine he struggled so hard to escape being. A noise crawls out of his throat, guttural and pained and animalistic. He has to close his eyes, squeeze them shut, grit his teeth and ride out the urge to punch Steve until Steve’s face caves in on itself in bloody, meaty ruin.

“Bucky?” 

Steve’s hand settles on his shoulder, a light, uncertain touch that he instantly slaps off. As Steve recoils in surprise, Bucky spins to his feet and puts distance between them. His head is spinning, and it takes him too long to realize it’s because he’s hyperventilating. “When were you planning on telling me?” someone, Bucky, asks in a voice that’s barely human. 

“And how was I supposed to tell you?” Steve replies, strained and strange. He looks like he wants to get up, start pacing, maybe toe off with Bucky. Instead, he does the smart thing and stays the fuck where he’s sat. “‘Guess what, Buck, your soulmate is Toni Stark and by the way, you killed her parents.’ How was I supposed to tell you?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky replies, hollow and drained, and puts his back to the wall. He sinks to the floor, lets his head tilt forward until it’s practically pressed between his knees. “I don’t know, but you should have fucking tried.”

There’s a long moment of silence, and then he hears Steve clear his throat. “I’m sorry, Bucky,” he starts, and falls silent again as Bucky barks a humorless laugh. 

“Sorry ain’t good enough, Stevie,” he says, and doesn’t bother looking up. “Sorry ain’t nearly good enough. Get out. Leave me the fuck alone.”

Another moment of silence, and Steve sighs, heavy and hurting, and his footsteps shuffle towards the door. Bucky’s beyond giving a fuck about Steve’s feelings right now. Behind his closed eyes, all he can see is the hurt and shock, the disbelief and horror. And all he can hear is Toni, telling him “You killed my mom” over and over again in that terribly empty voice. 

**oOoOoOo**

He manages to avoid talking about it until they’re safe in Wakanda. 

He’s grateful for the silence in which they limp from Siberia. He’s grateful for the awkward and stilted silence in T’Challa’s state-of-the-art medlab, with doctors and technicians poking at the damaged cybernetics, Steve holding his other hand and never complaining no matter how tight Bucky squeezes to distract himself from the pain. He’s grateful, in a really fucked up way, for the agony of their ministrations until one of them figures out how to disconnect the damaged circuits and the pain blessedly  _ stops. _

He knows Steve wants to talk about what happened. After so many years of friendship, even with his time under mindwipe in Hydra’s service, he can read Steve’s body language better than anyone else’s. He’s got that look on his face, that furrow between his eyebrows, and Bucky would just rather Steve didn’t bring it up at all. 

He knows that isn’t going to happen. When Steve looks like this, it’s all but guaranteed they’re going to have to talk about it. Now that he’s not in pain anymore, Bucky knows it’s just a matter of time before he can’t avoid talking about it.

He can’t even figure out how he feels about it.

His words have haunted him since they first appeared on that horrible fucking day back before the War, after he’d come home to tell Steve he’d enlisted, before he’d been sent to Lehigh for boot. No matter how much Steve’d tried to convince him that it could have been an accident, or it could be something unavoidable in battle, or that maybe his soulmate was mistaken and Bucky hadn’t actually killed  _ anyone,  _ he’d always known in the pit of his stomach that the moment in which his words were spoken was going to be one of the worst experiences in his life. 

Somehow, his worst fears have never even come close to the hideous  _ reality  _ of it.

He’s had time to think, time to turn things over and over in his head. If he’s honest with himself, he knows it’s because it’s been impossible to do anything  _ but  _ think. There have been moments in the last five days when he’s missed the silence of cryosleep, moments when he just wants his head to  _ stop working  _ for just a little while. Long enough to let him catch his breath. Long enough to let him figure things out. 

One of the things he can’t shake, though, is the knowledge that Steve figured it out long before Bucky did. Long before Toni did. He’d been there when Bucky’s words had come in. He admitted to Toni that he’d known Bucky had been the one who… 

He flinches viciously at the memory, and phantom pain flares along the skin of his lost arm again. 

With difficulty, he turns his semi-responsive prosthetic over, and traces the fingers of his good hand over the pitted and hastily-soldered metal plates. He doesn’t even need to squint to picture the words rising out of his skin, bold and black and block letters.  _ I don’t care, you killed my mom.  _

He makes a muffled noise, one of pain that tears up his throat on its way out, and turns his face away from his arm. God, what the fuck is he going to do? What the  _ fuck  _ is he going to do?

He doesn’t have any good answers. He doesn’t have any bad ones either. He has  _ no  _ answers at all. Instead, his head is choked with noise, clamoring with the voices of the angry ghosts of his past, and the pale, washed-out whispers of a future he was never meant to have.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Perceived self-harm, grief, emotional trauma, angst.
> 
> ===
> 
> Edited to add: @summerpipedream and @snowecat are terrible people and you should lambast them for helping me bring this fic to fruition. Much love, <3\. Can't do it without you.

She does press conferences with the bruising covered by expertly-applied pancake makeup, she gives impromptu interviews with mirrored sunglasses hiding her bloodshot eyes. She goes out to parties and makes charity donations. She presents to the world as the same rich, entitled asshole they’ve always considered her to be, and when she comes home, she goes straight to her shop to work out her rage on things she can actually fix.

She doesn’t sleep. 

She loses track of the days. It might have been six, or sixty, since Siberia. Rhodey comes and goes in her peripheral vision, and his voice echoes like she’s hearing him through water. Sometimes he’s in a tux and she’s in one of her many party dresses. Sometimes he looks exhausted and she’s in his sweatpants and her favorite tee. 

Sometimes, she realizes she’s not in the workshop at all, but sitting on the couch staring blankly at whatever Rhodey’s bingeing on Netflix, his arm around her shoulder and a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. When that happens, she always finishes her coffee, pulls away from him, thanks him for being there, and returns to the workshop.

Her project is taking shape on the main bench, a long cylinder of circuit boards and wires, RT sockets and repulsor ports. She has no idea what she’s doing, new armor design maybe, she’ll figure it out. The work soothes her. It’s rhythmic, hypnotic. It settles her agitated brain. Only in the shop, hands working her micro-solder on delicate connections, can she even begin to process the swirling memories of Siberia.

_ I didn’t know it was him,  _ Steve says, and his tone is agonized but his eyes are lying. 

_ I remember all of them,  _ Barnes chokes out, and his tone is agonized but she can’t see his eyes.

The micro-solder slips, and she swears violently, jerking her fingers back from the depths of … whatever it is she’s making. Sucking on the burned tip of her left index finger, she peers into the mechanics, checking by rote for any damage she might have done, and rubs her eyes tiredly when she can’t see anything worse than a loosened wire or two.

Still nursing her damaged finger, she pushes away from the workbench and moves to the first aid kit in the corner, awkwardly fumbling the burn cream out of the plastic box with her off hand. There’s something frantic and panicked building in her chest, muted and dim, and she tries to swallow it down as she treats the burn on her finger. 

She’s doing so well. Sure, she could be doing a lot better, but she isn’t trying to drink herself to death and she isn’t trying to kill herself in outer space. Given her track record, she’s the picture of mental health. That part of her that’s compressing tighter and tighter, trying to flail its way to the surface inside her rib cage, calls her a liar, but she does her best to ignore that the same way she’s ignoring the swelling panic. 

_ Did you know?  _ she remembers asking, in a voice that had to fight its way out of a tight, terrified throat. 

_ Yes,  _ Steve says, and his eyes tell her he’s lying, and his voice sounds so resigned. 

_ I remember all of them,  _ Bucky whispers, and she can’t see his eyes, but his voice crawls with shame.

The thing growing inside her lungs shivers and stretches and expands in a rush of terror that momentarily steals her breath. 

“No,” she whispers to herself, and packs the first aid kit neatly away again, then turns to return to the project. 

And stops dead at the sight of the cyberarm, nearly complete, displayed across her workbench. 

She’s never let herself see it from a distance, always covered it with an opaque drop cloth when she decided to stop for a few hours, never allowed herself to catch sight of the big picture. And she knows it’s because… it’s because….

Because she’s building Bucky mother-murdering fucking Barnes a new arm to replace the one he sacrificed to save her from Steve’s shield. 

The panicky thing claws its way, strong and sure, out of her chest and explodes in a scream out of her throat. 

She’s across the room before she even processes she's moving, back at the workbench, staring down at the arm. There's a hammer in her hand, she doesn't know where she got it. From the tool chest beside the first aid kit, maybe she always had it in her hand, she doesn't know. But it's heavy, and it's big, and it's exactly the right tool for the job.

She brings the hammer down again and again and again. The scream hasn't gone away, hasn't diminished, hasn't grown less panicked, hasn't softened in volume. It's a primal thing now, and she’s shrieking like a banshee, a berserker, a Greek Fury of retribution and revenge as the gunmetal surface of the arm dents, buckles, dimples and breaks under the force of the blows. The plates screel as she spins the hammer and uses the claw to peel them back, then goes back to smashing and screaming the most inventive epithets in her vocabulary. 

The crack of microcircuitry snapping and the crystalline shattering of delicate nanotech connections are music to her goddamn ears.

When the shaft of the hammer breaks, she dodges backwards out of instinct to avoid the claw-head flying towards her face. The jagged wooden handle scrapes deep into the meat of her arm. She hisses with shock, with pain, jerks her arm away to curl it protectively against her chest. 

She isn't conscious of making the gesture command, but she must have, because suddenly her repulsor bracelet has unfolded and cool, smooth, gleaming metal wraps around her fingers and palm. The crescendoing whine of a repulsor spinning to life is even better than the sounds of an iron hammer smashing through Bucky's new arm.

The remains of the arm blow apart in a very satisfying manner, what she can see past the tears suddenly in her eyes, streaming down her cheeks. Her arm is moving mechanically, almost like someone else is moving it for her, and the repulsors spin up again, a high-powered high tone that spits from her palm in a blue beam, vaporizing circuit boards and reducing metal plates to smoking slag. 

Her vision is swimming and her chest heaves; she’s barely conscious that she’s hyperventilating, and she’s destroyed the workbench before she realizes the panicked wheezing she can hear is her own breath labouring in and out of her lungs. Her thoughts are stuck on a repeating loop, spinning past her safety threshold, burning up her neural pathways, no breakpoint, no blue screen, no hard reset.

Her soulmate killed her mom. Her  _ soulmate  _ killed  _ her mom. _

Steve knew. Of course he knew. Who else did he tell? Who else in her life has been keeping earth-shattering secrets from her? Did Natasha know? Did Clint? Did  _ Bruce?  _ Have they all been laughing at her this whole time? Why didn’t anyone tell her?  _ Why didn’t anyone tell her? _

_ Yes,  _ Steve says, and he’s tired and resigned. 

_ I remember all of them,  _ Bucky says, lost and hollow.

She can taste blood in the back of her throat, isn’t sure if it’s because she’s screamed herself bloody, or because she’s bitten her tongue or cheek. Doesn’t care. Her injured arm swings wide as she demolishes the new bow she’d been working on for Clint, the upgraded Widow’s Bites for Natasha. Tactical armor meant for Steve. Stretchy pants for Hulk, made from unstable molecules out of the Baxter Building’s published research. The repulsor port burns her palm, it’s so hot. 

Doesn’t care. She doesn’t care. 

Because her soulmate killed her mom. 

_ Her soulmate killed her mom. _

The words on her arm catch her eye as she whirls around again to take aim at the nanotech station in the corner, where replacement circuits are tended carefully by nanites and AI protocols. She stops dead, staring at them. 

Neat letters, careful printing.  _ I remember all of them.  _

She remembers when they came in. Seventeen, graduating from MIT, just about ready to take up a life of business dealings and research and development and tinkering and inventing. Rhodey sat next to her in his gown and cap, grinning at her from beneath the jaunty tassel dangling over the board. Her words bloomed, warm and soft, under the scratchy sleeve of her robe as the Dean called her name, only daring to peek at them once the parchment was in hand, her tassel moved to the other side, hurrying down the opposite stairs to clear the stage for the next graduate.

_ I remember all of them.  _

God, how she’d dreamed about those words. Theorized and postulated countless scenarios, pondered endless circumstances. What would her soulmate remember? Her papers? Her parties? Tabloid photos? How many meetings they’d had before their words were spoken? What words did her soulmate carry? When would she speak them? 

When would she hear hers? 

_ I remember all of them,  _ Bucky confesses in choked tones. 

_ I didn’t know it was him,  _ Steve protests too quickly. 

“I don’t care,” she sobs brokenly, touches the words with shaking, gauntleted fingers. “I don’t care, you killed my  _ mom.” _

The repulsor port is burning hot, the whine reaching a distressed pitch. Her fingers are shaking, and she can’t tell if it’s from grief, or because the gauntlet is searing against her palm. She can smell ozone, sharp and clear, sure signs of a repulsor needing to discharge before it overloads. 

She doesn’t care. Can’t care. Tries to, and fails. 

_ I remember all of them.  _ She traces the lines over and over. Those words shattered her world to pieces, and she can’t understand why.  _ I remember all of them.  _ Lines and loops, deceptively innocent. Her vision swims, her head pounds.  _ I remember all of them.  _ Her hand is so goddamn hot. The words are so goddamn grim.

_ “Toni!”  _

A dark hand wraps around her gauntlet, yanks her wrist up just as the repulsor hits critical. The blast dents the wall, bowing the steel plating inward across an area the size of her chest. She stares uncomprehendingly at the damage, blinking tears out of her vision, looks at the smoking repulsor port in the middle of her gauntlet, and jerks her attention to Rhodey when he seizes her by both shoulders. 

His face, ashen and wide-eyed, looms in her vision. His mouth is moving, but she can’t hear anything past the high-pitched slurry of sounds ringing through her ears. He looks terrified, and one hand leaves her shoulder to claw at the gauntlet still on her arm. She swallows, fixates on his mouth, tries to understand what he’s saying.

_ “......trying to kill yourself….. -us Christ, Toni…. -on’t leave me. God, please don’t....” _

_ Oh.  _

“I wasn’t,” she whispers, but her throat is horribly dry and she isn’t sure she’s speaking at all. “I’m sorry, honeybear. I wasn’t.”

His grip is crushing, but she finds she doesn’t mind so much, because this… this is familiar. Her head on his shoulder, his arms like a vice around her, trying to keep her rooted to sanity. The smell of his laundry detergent and aftershave, both unchanged since college, hit her nose, hit her system like a soporific. She sags into him, loops her arms weakly around his waist, and the dam breaks. 

She drags him to the floor, her knees won’t hold her anymore, and fear’s taken the strength from his. He holds her tightly as she screams and howls, murmuring nonsense things into her ear as her tears soak his shirt. She cries until she’s hollowed out and empty, and drifts into unconsciousness on his shoulder. 

\-----

When awareness returns, some time later, it’s the air currents that wake her. She swims to the surface of what she distantly recognizes as sedative-enhanced slumber, and blearily cracks her eyes. The room is darkened, blinds pulled tight, but she’s not in her own suite at Stark Tower. She’s in a hospital bed. There’s an IV running fluids into her left hand, her right hand is bandaged, her head is pounding and her mouth is parched-desert dry. 

But Rhodey is curled around her, asleep on the pillow beside her with an arm over her stomach. Pepper is asleep, sprawled in the arm chair, heels kicked off, top two buttons undone, and hair mussed.  Vision’s eyes gleam at her from the corner of the room, where he’s standing sentinel, and as she meets his watchful gaze, his gaze softens. 

“Sleep, mum,” he says quietly, so heartbreakingly like JARVIS she feels tears sluggishly begin. “We’re here.”

She swallows hard, looks at Pepper, Rhodey, back to Vision. “Okay,” she says just as quietly, and closes her eyes again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My [tumblr](http://allthemarvelousrage.tumblr.com) sees this fic updated in snippets and sections long before I post a finished chapter, if that is a thing that interests you. Just look for my "ficlicious writes" or "wip" tags.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s surprising how easy it is to avoid Steve for days at a time. It might not be the courageous or responsible thing to do, but Bucky needs time to think and he isn’t going to be able to do it with Steve hovering around him all hours of the day and night. Then again, given that Bucky’s barely seen him at all since he had his arm turned part way off, maybe Steve’s being considerate and allowing Bucky his space unmolested. 

Bucky appreciates it, deep down in the corner of his soul that isn’t winter-chill furious with Steve. But after a couple of days of solitude, curled up in a chair in the expansive library, staring blindly out the window or into a cold, dark fireplace, or up in the rafters of the palace’s top levels, stretched out on exposed beams and all but invisible to those below him, he’s forced to conclude that thinking just might not be doing him any good.

Fuck it, he’s going to have to talk to Steve, if only to see if he can find something to answer any of the problems he’s been fruitlessly trying to solve since the words _I don’t care, you killed my mom_ came out of Toni’s mouth.

He finds Steve in a lounge on the far side of the palace, at the back where the jungle creeps right up the palace grounds and wide, flat leaves occasionally throw shadows over the windows. The churn of dull anger is familiar by now, souring his gut and bringing bile to the back of his throat, but he swallows it down and heads into the room instead of turning and walking away like he really wants to do.

Steve’s whole back visibly tenses, but he doesn’t turn towards Bucky, just continues to stand in the middle of the room, arms folded across his chest and looking up at the television set mounted on the wall. “The government’s convened a special committee to investigate the incidents in Lagos, Halle-Leipzig, and Siberia,” he says over his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the screen, where a blonde reporter talks into big, fuzzy microphone about the schism in the Avengers and the rising tally of property damage and casualties.

“That’s what governments do,” Bucky replies after a moment’s internal debate, shrugs and moves to stand beside Steve. “They get to make life hell for people they don’t like, throw their weight around, and accomplish nothing while showing their voters how very important and vital they are to safety and security. Buncha bullshit, if you ask me.”

Steve finally looks at him, wary hope and a faint smile on his face. “Some things never change,” he says. His eyes flick down to Bucky’s shoulder, like he wants to clap him on it, or rest his hand on it, or hell, Bucky doesn’t know anymore, give him a hug or something. But the glance only lasts for a moment before Steve turns his attention back to the screen.

Bucky’s silent, chewing on his inner cheek, watching the news crawl along the bottom of the report summarize the reporter’s story. Avengers fight, millions of damage, special committee convened. Bucky’s about to turn away, has even opened his mouth to start asking Steve things he wants to know about the whole shitshow of his soulbond, but the screen flicks to a new, related report, and Bucky sees Toni in dark glasses and a dark suit, hemmed in by big, bulky security-type meatheads on the steps of the Capitol building, and his heart fucking stops dead for a long, long moment.

“Shit,” Steve says, heartfelt and very quietly. “Buck…”

“Shut up, Steve,” Bucky snarls, takes two long steps forward, snatches the remote for the TV off the coffee table, and stabs the volume button to make it louder. “Just shut the fuck up.”

“...ending her second day testifying before the committee. Toni Stark, former CEO of Stark Industries and registered superhero known as Iron Man, seems undaunted by repeated calls to have her arrested and charged under the Sokovian Accords for her actions in Germany and later in Siberia. Making appearances at the Maria Stark Foundation’s annual fundraiser for the Make-A-Wish Foundation last week and a charity auction benefitting cancer research, all seems to be business as usual at Stark Industries. An unnamed source within the company, however, has indicated that Stark has not been seen anywhere but her very public appearances in weeks, and rumors may indicate that the Board of Directors will attempt to force her out. We reached out to Stark Industries’ current CEO, Virginia Pepper Potts, for a comment on these unsettling rumors, but received only silence from the tech juggernaut.”

The plastic remote crunches and cracks in his hand and it’s only with enormous effort that Bucky can pry his death-gripped fingers off its shattered casing.

“Bucky,” Steve says, quiet and compassionate. “Whatever you’re thinking…”

Bucky whirls on a heel, takes a step towards Steve, almost a lunge, and pulls up short just shy of his nose brushing Steve’s. “Not. A. Fucking. Word,” he growls through gritted teeth, steps around Steve and stalks away before the Asset still lurking in the back of his thoughts can do much more than begin to recite the trigger words.

**oOoOoOo**

She manages to behave herself for a full twenty-four hours before the restlessness sets in and she starts making noise about getting the fuck out of the hospital. Rhodey protests, and so does Pepper, and Vision gives her a face full of mild exasperation and unsurprised disappointment, which is just how she always thought JARVIS would look when chastising her. That alone is almost enough to make her stay, but in the end, she is undaunted and determined to escape the claustrophobic hospital room no matter which of her endearing but annoyingly overprotective family members she has to trample in the process.

The hospital staff issue dire cautions, give her stern looks of disapproval, but Toni has been hardened by years of cowering before Pepper and Rhodes, and they're both way better at inflicting silent guilt than a stranger in scrubs with a clipboard. Pepper throws up her hands in exasperation when Toni refuses to back down and goes to deal with the hospital administrative things Toni is more than happy to ignore.

“We’d all feel a lot better if you’d stay another day or two, Tones,” Rhodey says, and she doesn’t miss the grimace that flashes across his face as he bends to sit on the end of her bed, nor the way he rubs his calf, like he’s trying to work out a cramp. “With the stress you’ve been under lately, you could really use a few days of rest and fluids.”

Toni snorts, then goes back to fishing her clothing out of the cabinet they’d been stuffed in. “I had a nervous breakdown, Rhodey, not the flu. I’m fine. As far as the hospital is concerned, I didn’t even have that.”

“I knew having them admit you for exhaustion would come back to bite me in the ass,” Rhodey mutters and sighs.

“I love you too, honey bear,” she says absently, and examines him with a critical eye while clutching her clothing to her chest. Pangs of guilt stab at her; Rhodey looks exhausted, in pain, thin in a way that she knows from experience comes from worry, not lack of appetite. She’s done this to him, and maybe she didn’t mean to, but that doesn't change the fact that she did. She’s been a horrible friend to him, selfish and self-absorbed, but that needs to stop now. Her arms fall, just a little, loosen from their death grip on the garments. “I’ll stay if you think I should,” she says quietly.

Rhodey wheels around in surprise to blink at her so fast he nearly falls off the edge of the bed. “What?”

She shrugs uneasily and avoids his eyes, electing to fiddle with the collar of her suit jacket, rolling the button through her fingers. “If you think I should stay,” she repeats, swallowing hard against the bile churning in her stomach, “then I’ll stay. Historically, you’re the smart one who cares about my well-being. I’m the flashy, obnoxious one with a death wish. I should probably listen to you more often, so I thought I’d try it now.”

He squints at her with first one eye and then the other. “Okay,” he says with such suspicion and disbelief, she really can’t blame him. “Okay, who are you and what the hell did you do with my Toni?”

“She’s on vacation,” Toni replies, and turns her back to Rhodey in order to start changing out of the pyjamas the hospital provided her with. Whether she stays or not, she’s sick of wearing thin, scratchy clothes. “I’m sure she’ll be back at some point, but in the meantime, you get me.”

Rhodey’s silent for a long moment, until Toni’s done changing and has turned back around, gathering her hair to sweep up into a loose ponytail. Then he signs again, eyes her tiredly and says, “You promise you weren’t trying to hurt yourself?”

She sits on the bed next to him, threads his fingers through hers, and smiles sadly. “I really wasn’t. I promise.”

He squeezes her fingers gently. “And if I ask you to stay, you’re gonna stay? Easy as that?”

“Yeah, honeybear,” she replies. “Easy as that.”

He watches her for another moment, searching her face. “Okay, Toni,” he says softly, disentangles his hand from hers and painfully gets himself back on his feet. “Let’s get you home.”

She blinks, because this is not the outcome she thought she’d get. “Not gonna ask me to stay?”

Rhodey grins down at her, offers a hand to help her up, which she takes. “Are you kidding me? For the first time in your damned life, you are compliant and agreeable, and I can’t take proper advantage of it with you in the hospital.”

“That’s what I love about you, Rhodey,” she says, goes up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “Always thinking about others.”

**oOoOoOo**

He knows Steve is going to leave before Steve does. Despite his faults -- of which Bucky can name many -- Steve’s never abandoned his men without trying to save them. He’s got three currently imprisoned in the Raft, and Bucky knows Steve’s gonna make a move to get them out sooner or later. He wants to say he’s happy Steve feels at least that much loyalty to the Avengers, but in reality, he’s just relieved Steve’s attention has shifted from him for the time being.

It’s given him the chance to work through some of the confusion and let it evolve into a kind of smouldering fury that spreads throughout his body and chases the last of the lingering cold away.

He wishes things were different, turns it around and around in his head until he’s dizzy with all the ways things could have played out. The only thing he can be certain of is that none of it had to go down like it did. If Steve had told him, if Steve had told Toni, all the nastiness, all the pain could have been avoided. Maybe it wouldn’t have been pleasant, and it definitely wouldn’t have been easy, but it didn’t have to hurt this much.

Unless the point was to keep them apart.

It comes out of nowhere, that thought, but once it’s in his head, it takes root and lodges deep, and Bucky can’t shake it no matter how hard he tries. He doesn’t want to believe Steve deliberately kept him from his soulmate, but the Steve he remembers isn’t really the Steve he now knows. There’s anger and jealousy in him, deep and ugly, and his stubborn belief he’s right has grown fatalistic offshoots where he lights every bridge on fire and watches it burn behind him.

Maybe it played out this way, maybe it had to, because Steve didn’t want him to be with Toni.

And maybe he’s just bullshitting himself, trying to make sense out of the the senseless, trying to find the plan in universe’s cruel joke pairing him with the daughter of two of his victims. That seems just as likely as anything else, in the end.

Eventually, he draws the conclusion that he could spend another lifetime trying to figure it out, but there aren’t any answers for him here in Wakanda. T’Challa doesn’t have them. Steve doesn't have them. There’s only one place he’s ever going to find them, but that’s difficult and fraught with uncertainty, not the least of which is Steve’s bulldog determination to keep Bucky safe, even against Bucky’s own wishes.

The act of making a decision brings unexpected but welcome relief from the obsessive thoughts tearing him to pieces. Steve’s going to be leaving soon, even if he doesn’t know it yet, and Bucky wants to be ready when he does. So he rolls off the rafter beam, drops catlike to the floor beneath him, and goes to find T’Challa.

He has arrangements to make.

**oOoOoOo**

Toni throws herself full throttle into apologizing for her shitty treatment of Rhodey. She knows she’s freaking Rhodey out, and the bratty-little-sister part of her is enjoying that immensely, but mostly she just pretends not to notice the sideways baffled looks he gives her while she badgers him to go to the PT session he intended to skip in order to see her settled in her penthouse suite.

PT’s a lot more fun when she’s not the one that has to do it, she discovers, and takes every filthy curse and threat Rhodey throws at her while sweating through his exercises in perfect stride. She knows where his buttons are, pushes them with the precision of a neurosurgeon, and is there with a bottle of water to help him to the showers when he’s done.

She acquires his medical scans after some effort -- God, she misses JARVIS -- and studies the progression of his healing in tandem with up-to-date medical literature on his type of spinal injury until she can draw his vertebrae in her sleep. She swears to him up and down that she’s perfectly okay to spend a day in without him, and shoos him out the door for his mandatory meetings with the Senate in Washington about revisions to the Accords. The second FRIDAY tells her Rhodey’s left the building, she breaks out the holo screens and rebuilds the War Machine armor from the ground up to better accommodate his condition. When that’s done, she goes back to her notes and back to the scans and textbooks, and starts work on mechanized leg braces for casual use.

She makes time for Rhodey in a way she’s disappointed in herself to realize she never did before. Now, when they sit on the couch and watch whatever Rhodey’s bingeing on Netflix, she does her best to remain engaged and attentive to the program. She’s surprised to find it’s easy to get drawn into some of the programs, and soon learns how to shut the noise of her brain off long enough to focus on the plotlines and develop fan theories.

Arguing over character parentage and likely story directions in upcoming seasons is probably the most heated and spirited argument she’s ever had with Rhodey. Maybe even the most fun.

There are more charity functions, testimony before Congress, things at SI only she, as head of R&D can handle, but those slide past her notice like they happened in a montage. She designs in the living room on days Rhodey’s called away, she goes with him to PT when he wants her there, she watches Netflix with him and does her damnedest to forget she has words on her arm.

Sometimes, she even succeeds.

She hasn’t been back into the workshop since Rhodey dragged her out of it, asked FRIDAY to lock it down so no one would go in or out until she said so. But eventually, she’s done all the theoretical design work she can on the upgraded War Machine armor, needs a prototype for the exo-legs she wants to surprise Rhodey with, and can’t avoid going back in anymore.

She steels herself in front of the doors, ignores the panic hammering in the back of her throat, behind her eyes, and gives the voice command to lift the lockdown. The light on the bioscan beside the door turns orange, and the screen requests a palm print, which she gives with a hand that shakes only a little. The light goes green and the door clicks open before she can talk herself out of it.

The evidence of her breakdown is everywhere, from the scorch marks on the wall to the tools and broken scrap metal scattered across the floor. The cradle on her workbench holds the dented, mangled frame of the cyberarm she’d been building, and she swallows hard as echoes of Siberia threaten to rise from the depths of her memory.

_I didn’t know it was him,_ a familiar voice pleads faintly.

She clears her throat, deliberately turns away from the workbench and says, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”

The manufactory and assemblage facilities are behind the main workshop, and she strides to the door on the other side of the room, clutching her Starkpad and external storage to her chest like a lifeline and keeps her eyes firmly ahead even though she desperately wants to skew them left to absorb more of the damage she did here.

It takes her ten minutes to set up for War Machine’s redesign, and fifteen more to input the exo-leg schematics to run concurrently on a separate assembly line. Neither production queue estimates a total run time shorter than twelve hours, and it’s better than Toni thought it would be, but she’d hoped it would be a lot shorter. A four or six hour loiter in the manufactory, she could justify. Twelve plus is just… too much.

It’s ridiculous, but she doesn’t want to walk through the workshop empty-handed. She needs a shield, an aegis, a protective barrier between herself and all the bad things she’d rather stayed in breakdowns of the past. She doesn’t have much choice at the moment, though, so she steels herself once again and edges through the door back into the main workshop.

She makes it halfway across the floor without incident, keeping her eyes carefully on the door promising escape on the far side of the room, feeling her way forward with her toes and keeping her hands out to balance her in case she stumbles on something. The precaution proves utterly useless when her toes fail to detect the screwdriver ahead of her on the floor before her foot comes down on it and it rolls under the pressure of her weight.

She hits the floor on her hands and knees with enough force to bruise and the barely-withheld tears burn at the back of her eyes. She doesn’t need this, not now. She’s not ready for any of it. Does the universe hate her so fucking much that it continues to inflict insults and injuries on her long after it’s stopped being cute and she’s started wishing for an end?

_I didn’t know it was him,_ the same voice pleads from the back of her thoughts.

She growls, squeezes her eyes shut and snarls from gritted teeth, “Shut the fuck up, Steve!”

She reaches blindly, hauls herself up with the first solid surface her hands find, and comes face to face with the remnants of the cyberarm in its cradle on her workbench, dents and burns and rents and char marks scarring it into uselessness, and it strikes her suddenly as the most hilariously appropriate metaphor she’s ever seen.

She wraps her hair around her hand and secures it at the back of her neck with the elastic from her wrist as she laughs until tears stream down her cheeks, until she’s weak and near collapse from the sad hilarity, and has to lean heavily on the workbench with her head hanging over the cyberarm as she regains control of herself.

_I remember all of them,_ read the words on her arm, but now she knows what they really mean is _I’m sorry._

“Fuck you, Barnes,” she says softly, but without heat. She stares at the words a moment longer, rubs the pad of her thumb across them, then shifts her gaze to the ruined arm and sighs heavily. “And fuck me too,” she mutters, rubs her forehead tiredly. “Fuck us both.”

She's got twelve plus hours to kill. May as well do something frivolous with her time. She spends a few moments longer tracing the words on her arm before she shakes herself out of her introspection, collects her scattered micro tools from the floor, and bends over the arm to scavenge what she can use from the remains before she starts putting it back together.


End file.
